Failed to send certificate! Do you have your ID-card inserted into the card reader?

Estonian e-Residency Card: How to solve “Failed to send certificate!” error

So I got an Estonian e-Residency Card a while ago. This afternoon, finally, I decided to use it online with my Windows 10 laptop.

The process is pretty simple. You go to https://www.id.ee and download the driver software and everything should be smooth unless you are as impatient as I am. Instead of installing the driver software before plugging the card in, I just started by inserting the card to the card reader. A bad decision.

If you do that and try to login to https://www.eesti.ee/en, then Window’s default driver gets installed and will not allow browser such as Google Chrome to send the certificate out. You will see the following error:

Failed to send certificate! Do you have your ID-card inserted into the card reader?
Figure 1 – If you insert the e-ID card before installing the driver from www.id.ee, you will face “Failed to send certificate!” error.

Even if you install and re-install the driver software using the installer provided from the above link, it does not solve the problem.

To solve it, you need to go to C:\Program Files\Open-EID in the explorer and right click esteidcm.inf and select “Install”.

Figure 2 – Manually install esteidcm.inf by right clicking on it and selecting “Install”.

Now you should be able to login to https://www.eesti.ee/en.

Since it was really difficult to find the solution, here is my 2c. I hope it will help you.

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